Google’s ever-changing algorithms take into account more than 100 different factors before deciding if a company’s website or your blog are useful to the user. That is, how high up the list of search results you should appear. So, does this mean that robots and their logic are now more important than humans and their creativity?
In order for the soul to talk to the machine, we turn to what is known as SEO positioning. Understanding and harnessing SEO ensures we can tick the boxes Google is looking for. This can be anything from the domain name or web traffic to the way content is displayed (links, bolds, videos and original photos, text length, headlines, captions, headers, etc.). It also takes into account the internal architecture of the web (Alt images tags, metadescriptions, titles…) as well as the form of the content itself.
Is Google able to read articles? In a way, yes. Or at least it can read headlines and mine for the gold nuggets of SEO, keywords. Understandably, then, there are a lot of tools that help you identify the most useful keywords and even the headlines that work best. Lists remain top of the content tree, while content heavy in technical, medical or emotional terms is also likely to rank highly.
“He cannot say he loves me” or “My partner snores” or “My kids play too many video games” are some of the most frequent Google searches made by users in Sweden. Recognising this, in 2016 Ikea launched a campaign that used this information to give customers what they wanted. They temporarily renamed the products on their website so that when a user made some of those searches, a stool, a bookcase or a sofa would show up.
Tricks aside, SEO writing trends have changed in parallel with the evolution of Google’s algorithms, with increasingly more importance attached to the ‘human factor’. Now, in the age of “fake news” and content copying, trustworthiness, popularity and user reviews are now the criteria most highly valued by Google. Quite simply, the best way to get a good ranking on its search engine is to create quality and convince people to share it.
So, how do you create content people want to share? Above all, be genuine. And don’t simply write about the same topics thousands of people have written about before. Try and find new ideas, concepts or angles. This is the moment of seoactivity. But creativity has to go hand-in-hand with quality. Any content needs to be well-written and accurate, able to keep the reader in front of the screen for several minutes at a time. And not just any reader. It’s vitally important to identify the type of reader who is interested in what we are talking about. There is no more motivated reader than the one who makes a Google search. Our tip, therefore, is to write first and think about SEO later.
Marieke van de Rakt, a project manager at Yoast, a company that works to develop plugins to optimize WordPress, explains it like this: “The era in which some SEO tricks were enough for a website to get a good position in Google has ended. Nowadays, content is king. And a good content also gets more likes on Facebook, links on Twitter and website visitors. Of course, we can use several techniques to maximize the SEO of an article. But it’s more important to write a very, very good article!”
Yoast tips
– Don’t use keywords too often or it will affect the readability of a text.
– Choose the core message you want to transmit to your readers or clients and don’t deviate too much from this.
– Ensure all posts are written with a clear structure that has an introduction, a central body where you include your main message and a conclusion that summarizes the ideas or puts forward a new thought from what has gone before.
– Dedicate a paragraph to a single idea.
– Use headlines. They help enhance readability and also boost SEO. Use keywords in them.
– Try not to write more than 300 words per article. A recommended upper limit is 700 words.
– If you have previously published a post about the same theme, include a link to that article.
Content that scores
– Includes videos
– Highlights words.
– Includes Linkbait: that is, it contains links to interesting content that supports the article.
Long tail
When it comes to keywords, there are two simple tricks that are far more effective than simply using a single word or phrase numerous times within a text. Use synonymous and “long tail keywords”. The latter is easy to understand. So, while choosing “holiday” as a keyword would be very hard to rank high against that much competition, improve your odds by adding more words and descriptions. “Holidays with kids in the Caribbean” would be a good example. Although the most important thing still is to integrate them naturally into the original text, without your readers getting tired of repetition.
Photo by Green Chameleon
